The Department of English at the American University of Beirut
Cordially invites you to
Living between languages
as a poet / translator
A lecture by
Marilyn Hacker
Tuesday, 10 March 2015 at 5 pm in Bld. 37, seminar room
The talk draws on personal experiences as a poet and a translator, in particular in
relation to three Francophone Arab women poets: Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Lebanon),
Amina Saïd, (Tunisia), and Rachida Madani (Morocco). It focuses on Marilyn Hacker’s
translations of Khoury-Ghata’s Where Are the Trees Going? (Curbstone Poetry, 2014),
Amina Saïd's The Present Tense of the World: Poems 2000-2009 (Black Widow Press,
2011), and Rachida Madani's Tales of a Severed Head (Yale University Press, 2012).
Bio: Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s
Mirror (Norton, 2015), Names (Norton, 2010), and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003), an
essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010), and thirteen collections of
translations of French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Habib
Tengour, and Rachida Madani. DiaspoRenga, a collaborative sequence written with the
Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in
2014. Her awards include the National Book Award, the PEN award for poetry in
translation, the PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry
from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco. She lives in Paris.